Christ Church Picture Gallery


Christ Church Picture Gallery is an art museum at Christ Church, one of the colleges of Oxford University in England. The gallery holds an important collection of about 300 Old Master paintings and nearly 2,000 drawings. It is one of the most important private collections in the United Kingdom. The greater part of the collection was bequeathed by a former member of the college, General John Guise, arriving after his death in 1765. Further gifts and bequests were made by W. T. H. Fox-Strangways, Walter Savage Landor, Sir Richard Nosworthy & C.R. Patterson.
The Picture Gallery is especially strong on Italian art from the 14th to 18th centuries. The collection includes paintings by Annibale Carracci, Duccio, Fra Angelico, Hugo van der Goes, Giovanni di Paolo, Filippino Lippi, Sano di Pietro, Frans Hals, Salvator Rosa, Tintoretto, Anthony van Dyck and Paolo Veronese, and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer and Peter Paul Rubens and a great range of other artists, especially Italians.
The drawings collection is shown by a small exhibition, changing roughly every three months, and sometimes showing works not in the permanent collection, especially those by modern artists. The gallery was designed by Hidalgo Moya and Philip Powell, and built in 1968, enabling the collection to be open to the public for the first time. It is located in the Deanery garden.
Professor Joanna Woodall of the Courtauld Institute is a former Assistant Curator of the gallery. The current curator is Jacqueline Thalmann.
Late on 14 March 2020, paintings by Van Dyck, Annibale Carracci and Salvator Rosa were stolen from the gallery.

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